


Black Darjeeling

by scioscribe



Category: Deadwood
Genre: F/M, Marriage of Convenience, Post-Canon, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-09-20 18:22:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9505139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: In which a partnership is formed and consummated.  (May God help anyone who ever happens to get in its way.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thatyourefuse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatyourefuse/gifts).



> Happy Valentine's Day!

The proposal: swift and brutal as a knife to the throat, and he ought to know.

And she said yes. Lifted her chin and stared him down with cool eyes, like never mind the porcelain doll shape of her and never mind those pinned up curls and that history of dope and that rich bitch education that had polished her up so clean and fine, she was the match of him. He could almost believe it himself.

“I think,” Alma said, “I’d make an excellent Widow Swearengen.”

“Well, I like you being forward-thinking—and my conjecture is, us now being engaged, I’m entitled to take full liberty with language and ask you if you’d like a fucking drink.”

“That would be to our mutual pleasure, I’m sure, Mr. Swearengen.”

He watched her throw back the shot he gave her with a single hard flick of her wrist and said, “You’re a better hand at drinking than was your first husband, from what I remember.”

She smiled. Lips like rose petals. “I suppose because I’ve more knowledge of the world.”

“Ah,” Al said, weighing his voice down with mawkishness. “Poor Brom.”

“Perhaps if you’d succeeded in your ambitions where the both of us were concerned, you’d marvel at my daintiness as well.”

“If I’d succeeded in my ambitions where the both of you were concerned, never for the rest of my life would I give either of you a fucking thought.”

“What opportunities,” she said, “you would have missed.”

Al said, “For the wedding, wear that red dress with all the fucking ribbons laced across the front, huh? It’s been the bedevilment of my fucking imagination since the first time I saw it.” He could have foregone saying it—true though it might have been if he were constrained to admit it at least to himself, and he supposed, having aired it to the fucking room, he was—but he wanted to see if that mouth of hers would falter at it. He’d take a marriage in cash only if she insisted, not being in a profession where he’d ever run short of available cunt, but:

But she stayed as smooth as glass, and unbroken in the bargain. “It has lace along the sleeves, here.” She drew one finger across the inside of her arm, just below the ruffled edge of the bottle green confection she had worn to see him. (“The color of money seemed appropriate for what I suspect will be the nature of our discussion,” she’d said.) The motion pushed up the sleeve until he was looking at the cool white inside of her arm laid out flat; the blue pulse at her wrist. All dressed up in watered-silk money with velvet trim. “And along the collar, here.” She raised her head again, but not, this time, to show him nothing but calm evaluation. She laid her fingers lightly on either side of her throat. “It’s very fashionable, I know, but at the end of a long day—at the end of such a wedding as it would only be appropriate for a man of your stature and a woman of mine to have—I should think it would itch terribly. I’d have to remove it posthaste.”

It was cowardice and hesitation prettied up under the name of caution, in Al’s opinion, that made men wait on doing what was necessary and what would gratify their own hearts and pricks and petty idolatries besides, and he’d never been afraid of getting what he wanted, never been one of those milk-livered types confounded by the achievement of his own fucking desires. He wed Alma Russell Garret Ellsworth in two weeks’ time, with Trixie all in pink like a paper Valentine at her side, his past and his future, like he was some bride being given away, traded from one set of hands to another.

He had good taste in them, though. It was a weak man who chose weak women and it was a fucking idiot who ever labored long under the illusion weak women lasted in Deadwood as long as those two had. He’d made that mistake once with her, but as funny as it sounded, he knew she forgave him that. They hadn’t known each other.

“You’ll keep the Gem, of course,” Alma had said to him only that morning, as she was buttoning her gloves. “I scarcely think you could be persuaded into decency, and in any case, it’s a valuable location, quite central. And exceptionally convenient, should you be gentleman enough to escort me to the bank in the mornings.”

“And all that aside,” Al said, “notwithstanding the escorting, which I’ll be sure to provide Pinkerton-style, with men riding alongside with Gatling guns, given your fucking propensity for attracting murderous intent, I’ll admit to a sensitive stirring of the heart for this particular joint. Many have I owned and many have I killed to keep, but it’s here I’ve fallen victim to fucking sentimentality. Here.” He buttoned her right glove, where her left hand was clumsier. This particular pair was red-dyed kid and soft as butter. There she stood before him, scarlet-handed, scarlet-gowned, twice-widowed and bedded more times than that, with pearls on her throat. He’d been ready to say that he gave her credit for being wise enough to not waste wheedling on what there was no chance of her getting, but somehow it escaped him. That, at least, wasn’t sentimentality. He knew full well where the source of that fucking distraction lay.

“Thank you, Mr. Swearengen,” she said in a voice whipped lighter than pastry cream. “But it wasn’t only to secure help with my dressing that I visited, nor to ensure your timeliness, which I trust was never in doubt, but rather to say that inasmuch I neither expect nor demand your relinquishment of _your_ property, I hope you feel likewise toward mine.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Should you pass your doubts on to Trixie, and she pass them still further than that, Star will cry his fucking eyes out at your fucking mistrust of that contract I believe he vetted closer than did God the Ten Commandments.”

“The stipulations provide for my control of my house and a portion of my funds,” Alma said, “and I don’t begrudge you a cent of the latter, the arrangement to my eyes being equitable. We both gain.”

“I suppose at some point in your youth you were all aquiver with romance. I can be glad that at such a time, we never spoke, because I think, my dear—if I can take an early fucking liberty with _that_ language, too—I much prefer you now.”

“Thank you. I much prefer myself as well. It’s my residence in my own home I seek to verify.”

“That I won’t require you to sleep in a whorehouse is your present and immediate concern? On that count, lay your head to unblemished pillow in perfect fucking confidence.”

“I would welcome your staying, from time to time,” Alma said, standing to leave and smoothing down her skirts. “Though you’ll need to speak with greater civility around Sophia, should she be in the room. Jane Cannery used to contribute a penny to her education at every misstep.”

Then that little girl would prove more learned than fucking Solomon, was Al’s opinion, though he’d be damned before he’d do the same, pitching pennies into some jar whenever he was moved to express himself with full force and feeling, but civility he had, and could, he thought, generally maintain in the child’s presence. Though it had been a long time since he had been asked to supply it. He’d been in the civilization business and it was not, in the end, very fucking civilized in its own right: more of a blood and money affair.

So later that day, he wed his lady of blood and money, and it was in her house, not his house of fucking iniquity, that they consummated it all, exactly like they would have if the point of it hadn’t mostly been served by the scratching of both their names on paper.

“It unlaces at the back,” Alma said. “The ribbons across the front of the bodice are decorative only.”

To draw the eye to her tits, what there was of them. He ran slippery ribbons over the calluses on his fingers and loosened her dress slowly until it collapsed around her feet and she was there in nothing but a thin, see-through shimmy; when she turned to face him, he could see the pink of her nipples through it. Could see the dark shadow of the hair between her legs. She reached for his prick but he caught her hand in his.

“I won’t be dragged to bed like a horse by a rope.” He examined her: passed his hands over her breasts and felt her nipples peak underneath the slight pressure of his thumbs. “I suppose fucking Trixie told you about me, is that it? The two of you being so prone to conversing like you got no knowledge of any fucking incongruity in it all—well, she does, but comes to you all the same. She told you what I like?”

“We walked to the mining operations,” Alma said, “and she indicated to me the movements of the machinery, the pistons slamming in and out of the ground. She said you made love like that. Like a blunt instrument.”

Al laughed. “I’ll bet your fortune and mine, Mrs. Swearengen, on just one thing: fucking Trixie ain’t said ‘made love’ in her whole fucking life. Not about me and her who know each other too well.”

“Yet I would bet our fortunes on the language being immaterial.” She sat down on the bed—their bed, if he were going to go around putting names to things—and eased herself back until she lay against the pillows and all the rest of the fucking frippery she’d acquired from having too much money and too much room in her fucking bed for too fucking long. Perfumed soap with a prize inside, he’d be damned. She lifted her hips and rolled down her drawers. Spread her legs. “Will you come to bed, Mr. Swearengen, or will you not?”

“Talk about pistons and blunt instruments didn’t fucking disincline you any, then?” he said, taking off his jacket.

“There is a line in a book I was passed once by some school friends of mine,” Alma said. “‘His very roughness brought her to disorder.’” _  
_

_Goes through her men like Sherman to the sea_ , he’d said of her to Jack.

 _So I suppose_ , Jack had said back to him all that time later, that very afternoon with his hand on Al’s elbow, _you’ve decided to burn. Well, better to marry than, Saint Paul would say, though I never saw you as greatly inclined to follow the words of Saint Paul, or the opinions, for that matter, of fucking anyone._

He joined her on the bed. “You do hear about well-bred women with their turned-up fucking noses and their perfumed cunts getting a taste for dirt. I suppose you think that makes me fucking lucky, that I should fall to my fucking knees and kiss you right _here_ —” he moved his hand, winning a hard gasp from her throat almost like the twang of some instrument, “in thanks for such beautiful bounty.”

She put her legs around him and drew him closer: the fucking _heat_ of her there. He moved his hand again and found her rhythm, but she talked through it, even as her hair grew damp with sweat and fell against her forehead. “But you forget, Mr. Swearengen, the influence of the locale. In your calculation of whether or not I expect gratitude.” She arched her back. “Here in Deadwood, I am no goddamn lady.”

But her cheeks pinked prettily at the word, like it was the first time she’d said it; but even that didn’t stop her from bringing their hips together and telling him to never mind his hand. Accordingly, roughness and fucking disorder followed for them both. And afterwards, she remembered the tea he liked best; made it for them both and undressed again to drink it in bed with him, her legs open, one silken ankle against his own.

“I believe we will suit each other very well,” she said. “And our alliance, such as it is, will benefit the camp.”

“Your kind,” Al said. “Fucking un-American is what it is, not that I mind, us only recently being brought into the fold and so savageries of your aristocratic turn of mind persisting fucking naturally. Me and you, the king and queen of fucking Deadwood, and I should rend to pieces that green dress of yours because the color of _our_ money, in all times to come, will be nothing fucking gold: trustworthy, and reliable to banker types such as yourself who are inclined to seek collateral. The royal impulse of your statement being my fucking point.”

There she went, meeting his eyes again, as steady and self-confident as a fucking cat, and yeah, they would suit, he had no fucking doubt of that:

“And I will build you a balcony on this house as well,” Alma said.


End file.
